Page:The Spirit of Russia by T G Masaryk, volume 1.pdf/352

326 vidualism, and European constitutionalism fell with liberalism. It is true that the slavophils recognised the need for reforms, but these were to be "inner" reforms only. Hence they were declared opponents of political revolution. To them, as to so many monarchists and legitimists, it seemed that Russia was on principle opponent of the revtilution, and not opponent merely, but, as a historic datum, the positive contradiction of every possible revolution. Tjutčev, the most notable of the slavophil poets, in some verses published in the year 1848 entitled Russia and the Revolution, contrasted Russia, as a truly Christian land and indeed the only Christian land, with the revolution, with antichrist. l. Aksakov loathed the revolution, not merely in its nihilist manifestations, but when it presented itself as liberalism and constitutionalism.

Tsar Nicholas and his government had no love for the slavophils, despite their hostility to the revolution and their unpolitical program. Kirěevskii's journal was suppressed. Homjakov, in 1854, on account of his poem To Russia, was forbidden to have his works printed, and in recent years his writings and studies concerning the Russian church have been posthumously prohibited. Both the Aksakovs had trouble with the censorship and with other authorities. To the official mind it seemed that the early slavophils belonged to the same political school with the westernisers. Not until the reign of Alexander II was comparative freedom granted to the slavophils. In 1855 K. Aksakov demanded from the tsar the freedom of the press and the summoning of the zemskii sobor.

Against the disastrous individualism and subjectivism which Stirner had introduced into Europe, Homjakov was not content merely to appeal to religious catholicity. In an extremely characteristic manner he supported his religio-philosophical reasoning with an argument drawn from the agrarian field. Agriculture, he said, offered a protection against individualism. It was the guardian of "true conservatism" and democracy, and the Teutonic warrior and the conquering state were contrasted by him with the Russian state of peasants and great landowners. The Russian landowner was likewise an aristocrat, but of a very different species from the aristocrat of the west; the Russian aristocracy was democratic, and was associated with the peasantry upon terms of Christian love. Samarin went yet further, pointing to Europe, where conservatism found its main foundations in the aristocracy, whereas in Russia